suggest a third satellite. No matter. We are on a planet with moons and a star somewhere out there. The day here lasts anywhere from seventy-two to ninety-three hours, the night thirty-six to forty-five. This anomaly may be in flux due to the unstable field of this dimension or due to seasonal changes or, perhaps, because that time in this place is distorted from what we know.
But you’re probably asking yourself how one dimension can possibly link with another. To understand how such things can exist, let us picture the birth of the universe – the so-called Big Bang. Evidence suggests that the universe as we understand it was born out of what physicists call a “singularity”. A speck of infinite density occupying zero volume. Boggles the mind, don’t it? Now in the first split-second of the Big Bang, this point of infinite density – which contained all the mass and energy that would become the universe-underwent an exponential diffusion or expansion, an inflation of sorts. This diffusion or explosion created matter, time, space, energy, everything known and more that aren’t. Now this primordial explosion is not simply three-dimensional, but multi- dimensional, and thus creates not only our universe, but all of multi-dimensional space in one fell swoop. This explosion or implosion, would create an endless number of spatial dimensions… those of real space and those of hyperspace.
Now, if you are from the “modern” world… I use this loosely, as I left earth as such in 1983… then you are familiar with black holes. A black hole or “singularity” is created when a large star exhausts its nuclear fuel and implodes, collapses into its own intense gravity. This singularity becomes a sort of matter-energy whirlpool which sucks in anything, even light, and cycles it somewhere else. It may implode on our end, but explode open somewhere else. These singularities, in essence, may become wormholes, passages from one spatial dimension to another. Many cosmologists believe that the known universe is but one of countless parallel universes, sort of like an unknown number of soap bubbles suspended in mid-air. Normally, these universes or dimensions would be out of reach of one another, but according to Einstein’s equations, there may be a series of tubes or channels – wormholes – that connect these universes. Technically, these wormholes would be called Einstein-Rosen bridges, tunnels that connect two distant spheres of time-space. And you, my friend, have proven their existence for you have passed through one!
Wormholes. According to the most radical and theoretical particle physics of my day, these wormholes would be composed of a sort of exotic matter, a “negative matter” which is not antimatter, in case you were wondering. This negative matter would possess a naturally powerful antigravity field and it would be this field that would hold these wormholes open forever or for short periods of time. Let me give you the classic wormhole analogy to illustrate this. If the universe was a pear, say, then an ant wanting to travel from the front to the back would have a long trip ahead of him, but if a worm had tunneled through the pear, then the ant could take the shortcut. And, essentially, wormholes are just that: time-space shortcuts.
Now, to simplify things, from here on in, where we are is called Dimension X (to borrow the name of an old radio show). Now I believe that an infinite number of these wormholes were created during the Big Bang. Some have closed up and others are still open and new ones are being created by star implosions all the time. Regardless, even those that have closed are as precarious as earthquake fault lines, in that a certain combination of forces can rip them back open as easily as a poorly-mended hem. Here, in Dimension X, where the energy field is somewhat unstable, these wormholes are something of a naturally-occurring phenomena much like tornadoes. When the proper atmospheric conditions exist, an energy flux of some type here opens one of these wormholes… sometimes to our planet and probably sometimes to many others. So, if you can imagine our dimension and Dimension X lying side by side, grids of a sort composed of perpendicular lines, then you can understand that now and then these lines would, simply by random chance, line up, become parallel to one another and maybe it would be this, more than anything else, that would weaken certain areas of space so that wormholes would be sort of an inevitability.
Okay, so you’ve passed through a wormhole, you’ve experienced what could be called interspatial teleportation through interspace. You have passed from one spatial cycle to another without having to transverse the limitless space itself. If you’ve been paying attention and I hope you have, then you realize that the shortest distance between two points is through the 4 ^th dimension. Instead of climbing over a mountain or going around it, you tunneled straight on through. You’ve bypassed the curves. What the vortex did was to propel you like Captain Kirk and his warp drive. Hyperdrive, would be the actual term, passing through the curves of limited three- dimensional space by dropping out of it and then back in somewhere else.
Now what? Well, you’ve made the trip, can you make the trip back? Theoretically, yes. You can return. It will be a matter, I think, of returning to your stepping off point into this world. Which I am certain is somewhere in what I have called the Sea of Mists (see my chart). It really will be a matter of waiting for the wormhole to open and being in the right place at the right time. If it opens, using a boat or plane, I think you can punch your way back through. But, by all means, do not enter a wormhole in any other geographical location or you will find yourself God-knows-where. If my theory is correct, the wormhole that brought you here… all of us here… will only open in that locality. Now beware of one thing. If you are lucky enough to pass through to our world, consider the time distortion factor. Einstein discovered that gravity and other forms of linear acceleration can cause a distortion in the curvature of fourth-dimensional time-space. Essentially, this acceleration can bend time. And you, my friend, accelerated through hyperspace at an impossible speed… well, you may be in for a surprise. What may happen is what’s known as temporal stasis or the slowing down of time. You may return to the world you knew or you may return a million years in the past or future. It’s impossible to say. Conversely, the bending of time may counteract itself when you pass back through.
Again, I’m just guessing.
This brings my little sermon to an end. Once again, I am traveling to the Sea of Veils, to the Lancet. Because what the three of us – Imab, Betydon, and myself – discovered there, was revelatory indeed. When I say that the Lancet is the key, I know of what I speak. If we had had more time… well, no matter. I will go up there again. To satisfy my own scientific curiosity, if nothing else. For that ship holds secrets. And it is, I believe, the focal point for what caused the horrible deaths of Imab and Betydon. For, if you have been here any length of time, you may have felt the presence of another. What this thing is, I cannot say, only that I believe it to be destructive and sentient. Something that may lie dormant or inactive for extended periods of time. A sort of potential energy waiting to spend itself. Lately, I’ve felt it building. I believe it is about to become kinetic.
God help us, God help any creature with a conscious, reasoning brain when that happens.
I will die, perhaps. But I will die knowing. Not just the nature of that thing (something that boggles the mind), but of the secret of the Lancet. For there, I think, are the keys to deliverance from this place.
This, then, is my mission. I leave you this letter, my chart. Help yourself to my gun and supplies. For I no longer will need them. Please, do not come after me.
May God protect you,
John R. Greenberg
That is where the letter ended.
Cushing stood there, amazed and informed, depressed and confused, feeling a great many things. Maybe there was hope now and maybe there was a complete lack of it. There were certainly a lot of questions he needed answered and, unfortunately, this Greenberg… the Hermit. .. was not there to answer them.
“What do you know about this guy?” Cushing asked Elizabeth.
She just sighed and shook her head. “He was a crazy old man who didn’t like people. My Uncle knew him… visited him sometimes.. . he was out of his head.”
“Maybe not.”
“We should go,” Elizabeth said.
Cushing found himself staring at her. “You didn’t want me seeing this, did you?”
She shook her head.
“You knew he was gone?”
“Yes.”
“And-”
“And I didn’t want you filling yourself with his crazy ideas. I didn’t want you to get filled with false hope,” she said to him, “because it is false.”
It was confession time. She told him her Uncle Richard had been something of an acquaintance of the Hermit. That he believed implicitly in the Hermit’s science. Uncle Richard spent days on end trying to find that vortex that
